Advances in computing technologies have provided users of computing devices with access to a variety of computing tools. To illustrate, increased capabilities of computing devices such as mobile smart phones and tablet computers have allowed users of the devices to access and use a variety of software applications that have been developed for the computing devices.
Such advances have challenged designers of user interfaces for devices such as mobile smart phones and tablet computers. A common challenge has been to design and implement user interfaces that provide an appropriate balance of information, usability, intuitiveness, control, efficiency, and functionality that promotes a quality user experience. While user interface technologies have made significant advances in this regard, there remains room for improvement. For instance, there remains room to improve the intuitiveness, convenience, efficiency, and/or usability of user interfaces that are designed to be used by a user of a mobile device to navigate media program listings to locate and access media content that is of interest to the user.
For example, an interactive media program guide application running on a mobile device having a touch screen display may provide a user interface that allows a user of the mobile computing device to scroll across an interactive media program guide to view media program listings (e.g., television program listings) included in the guide. Such an application typically utilizes scrolling capabilities that are native to the mobile device (e.g., scrolling capabilities provided by an operating system of the mobile device) to continuously move (e.g., pan and/or tilt) the user's view across a larger overall image of the interactive media program guide that is not wholly displayed on the touch screen display. Such scrolling is known as “smooth scrolling.”
To support smooth scrolling, the mobile device typically renders and caches an overall image of the entire interactive media program guide such that the cached image is available for local access and use by the device to display different views of the image of the guide as the user scrolls across the image, without the device having to perform computations involved in rendering the overall image each time the user scrolls. This provides a smooth scrolling experience to the user.
However, the caching and using of the cached overall image by the device as described above places limitations on a user interface. For example, because the entire overall image of the interactive media program guide is rendered and cached in order to support smooth scrolling, each rendering and caching of the overall image may be resource intensive. Accordingly, certain user interface features that may require re-rendering and re-caching of the overall image may be impractical to include in the user interface, especially when the amount of data included in the overall image being rendered and cached is large. For example, a feature that resizes a graphic included in the overall image of the interactive media program guide may be impractical to include in a user interface that allows a user to continuously scroll across an overall image of the entire interactive media program guide, especially when the interactive media program guide is large and includes many media program listings (e.g., listings for several days or weeks of television programming on hundreds of television channels).